Should Sunday roast dinners still be on the menu?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/25/sunday-roast-menu-head-to-head

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Fay Schopen: Roast dinners are a comfort blanket that practically cook themselves

I am not a traditionalist. As I write, I am eating cake for breakfast. But the news that the Sunday roast is in danger of dying out – thanks to, as the Daily Mirror puts it, “lazy families” turning to “easy to make” meals – saddens me, for I am an ardent roast dinner fan.

Figures from market analysts Kantar Worldpanel show that the number of times British people sat down to eat a joint of meat and two (or three or four) veg – or “roast dinner occasions” as the Grocer magazine terms them – have tumbled by 55 million in the last year. This decline of 4% may not seem like a huge amount, but is a worrying trend nonetheless. There are some fascinating statistics in the research. Peas, for example, are down 9% in popularity. Good (with apologies to pea farmers ), because peas have no place in a roast dinner. And I would like to point out that if, as the Mirror suggests, you are spending “hours … boiling veg” then you are doing it wrong. The Grocer also notes that the time-consuming nature of producing roast dinners can be “hellish”, which baffles me.

One of my greatest pleasures is pottering around the kitchen on a Sunday night, glass of wine in hand, listening to The Archers omnibus (I know it’s not on then, I save the podcast especially because I am sad), whilst a delicious roast chicken turns golden brown in the oven. And what could be easier? The meat and veg practically cook themselves. Make gravy from the meat juices, add some greens and you’re done. Being greedy, I also make stuffing and bread sauce, but there are packets for those.

I do accept that you have to spend a certain amount of time making a roast dinner, however. Serving them at lunchtime, as was traditional, meant you could spend a whole morning slaving over a hot stove, which was fine, although the obvious drawback was that it was less acceptable to drink wine at 11am. You could even listen to The Archers omnibus in real time.

But we’re freer now, and there are plenty of other exciting things to do on Sunday afternoons that don’t involve getting lumps out of gravy. Much as I love roast dinners, if they become a weekly obligation they would lose their appeal. Many of us enjoy pub roasts with friends. Or just the pub part.

And that to me is the joy of the roast dinner – it is no longer an obligation, but a choice. A meal you can share with loved ones – or eat alone. (I have been known to make a whole roast dinner just for myself, because I’m worth it.) Roast dinners are a comfort blanket; cooking them an act of meditation. They’re a pile of delicious animal fat and roasted carbohydrates smothered in gravy. And best of all, if you’ve cooked it, you can get someone else to do the washing up.

Philip Hoare: it’s an oppressive outmoded practice – unhealthy and sleep-inducing

I think the ritual of Sunday dinner (never lunch in my family) was invented as a way to consume the deadening hours of a day which, once we’d been to mass, yawned claustrophobically ahead, with only the promise of school or work the next day. My mother, who hated cooking and would rather have been on the stage, would toil over an ancient gas stove attempting to replicate the venerated Yorkshire puddings of my father’s youth in Bradford. (Indeed, it has been claimed that the Sunday roast was itself a Yorkshire invention, created during the industrial revolution when meat was left cooking in the oven while the family went to church). A lump of dead animal would fester in a tray of spitting fat, surrounded by the only edible element as far as I was concerned, the roast potatoes. The vegetables would be reduced to degrees of green and orange mush. Family Favourites would be on the radio, and the work of hours in the kitchen would be consumed in minutes. Then everyone would fall asleep.

Not having eaten meat for 20 years, I am biased, but it seems to me that Sunday lunch is an outmoded institution. We have better things to do, and better things to eat (hopefully not animals). As much as I agree with the apartness of the day – for all that it has been lamentably eroded by Sunday opening hours – the idea of massive carbohydrate consumption at midday, inevitably provoking post-prandial stupor, is crazy.

You can almost feel the arteries harden. It completely destroys the possibility of activity in the afternoon – making the whole looming prospect of Monday even worse. The Sunday lunch is an archaic reminder of a working-class past, a commemoration of an age in which no meal was worth eating if it lacked meat. Dreariest of all is the prospect of a Sunday pub offering slabs of sliced beast, as if we were all about to embark on a week’s worth of work on a farm or on a production line, when the most energy we may burn are keystrokes on a computer.

For vegetarians, condemned to a dry nut roast alternative, the legacy of the meat hegemony is even worse. I wonder at the pages of my mother’s copy of Mrs Beeton’s Cookery – a 1940s present which must have been about as welcome as a car manual. It offers intricate and lengthy chapters on the carving of every kind of joint possible, easily outweighing, with all that sinewy hubris, the patronising vegetarian recipes for Vegetable Goose and Nut Galantine, most of which involve interchangeable amounts of breadcrumbs and walnuts. Those same implements used by my father to carve the joint still lie in my kitchen drawer, pronged and bone-handled like instruments of medieval torture.

For me, the associations of a roast dinner do not evoke pangs of hunger, but received memories of oppression and an enslaved work force. I think of the pathetic Christmas dinner of the Cratchits in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And although George Orwell wrote a slightly unconvincing essay on the merits of British food, the very fact that he claimed that the News of the World was part of “the fabric of Britain, as central to Sunday as a roast dinner”, speaks to a reactionary past of set values and set menus, of the exploitation of people and animals, and one which we are better rid of.

This was food as duty, and thank goodness, we have been set free.